Mark Zuckerberg’s Childhood Website Was Slightly Uglier Than Facebook

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A commenter on Hacker News pulled this gem out of the bowels of the Internet today. It’s a personal website that appears to have been created by Facebook tycoon Mark Zuckerberg, who was then a high-school freshman, on Angelfire in about1999.

As you can see from clicking around on the site, young Zuck (who went by "Themarke51@aol.com") was quite the character, even if his web design skills were a little lacking. He made a Darth Vader–themed AIM plug-in called the "Vader Fader." He had a rudimentary social-networking app called the Web (good name!) that was built in Java. And, importantly, he has an "About Me" section that begins: "Hi, my name is … Slim Shady. No, really, my name is Slim Shady. Just kidding, my name is Mark."

We don’t know definitively that the page is Zuckerberg’s. But clues point to yes. Vice’s Motherboard blog did some digging and found that the e-mail address on the site was associated with an AOL screen name that is known to belong to Zuckerberg’s dentistdad.

Perhaps the weirdest thing on the site is that Zuckerberg seems to have a vendetta against a guy named Douglas Kim. On his “The Best” page, a young Zuckerberg picked on poor Douglas by singling him out in not one but fourcategories:

The best computer - Douglas KimThe best student - NOT Douglas KimThe best athlete - NOT Douglas KimThe best at StarCraft - STILLNOT DouglasKim

Douglas Kim: Are you okay? All these years later, does having been burned on Angelfire by a future dot-com billionaire keep you up at night? Do you sit all alone on your couch, day in and day out, thinking, God, was I that bad at Starcraft? Douglas, we’re here for you. If you want to tell us the story of how Zuckerberg hurt you, or just vent about your freshman-year nemesis’s success, drop us aline.

And for the rest of you, be warned: If you get famous someday, rest assured that someone will dig your crappy 98 Degrees fan site out of the Geocities cache.